A Chinese-language poster promising America's resources to China

A Chinese-language poster catalogued at 1939 sets a colour portrait of a man before an American flag above the vertical slogan "America's resources are China's resources." The only issuer line is 美國印行, "issued by America." No agency is named. National Archives 44-PF-752a.

What the sheet prints

A portrait of a man in colour fills the upper part of the sheet, with the Stars and Stripes behind him. A striped band runs across the bottom. Between them, in vertical Chinese characters, is the whole message. The archive slug names Roosevelt; the catalog description itself says only "a man," and this page leaves it there.

美國的資源就

是中國的資源

美國印行

[Translation: "America's resources are China's resources." Imprint: issued by America.]

Who issued it

The sheet names no office. Its only credit is the three-character imprint saying America printed it. The National Archives holds it in Record Group 44 among World War II foreign posters, local identifier 44-PF-752a. FRAME lists the audience as a foreign public and the purpose as winning support, and tags one device, transfer: the flag and the portrait stand behind a promise.

How to read it

The promise is total and unmeasured. It does not say which resources, how much, on what terms, or by whose decision. A poster is not a treaty, and no one reading it in China could hold anyone to it. That vagueness is the method. A large nation's flag and a portrait do the work that figures would otherwise have to do.

There is a second audience to think about, even though the poster was not printed for it. The resources in question belonged, in the end, to American taxpayers, and this pledge of them was addressed to a foreign public, in its language. Whether aid to China was wise is a separate question that this sheet does not answer. The libertarian point is narrower. Commitments of a nation's wealth abroad ought to be made where the people paying for them can see and debate them. A slogan in a foreign script is not that place.

The flag-and-face device is transfer as the Institute for Propaganda Analysis defined it. Later wartime material for overseas audiences is gathered on the Office of War Information page.